My Rebuttal to a Metaphysicist

“To not believe in the Spiritual realm of our existence means nothing I say will matter to ya”

I disagree. I can listen to your arguments all day despite being a materialist. I think you fear that nothing you can say will be able to change my mind because that might mean that you don’t really have something revolutionary to say. You might use the same arguments others have used already and that have been shot down and let’s face it, so far religion vs science is 0 – 100, the scientific method is the champion. We know now that we know. We know that we are things that know things, including the thing that is ourselves. We can look at it, we can feel it, we can hear it, we can taste it, we can smell it, we can dissect it, we can build on it, we can articulate it, we can reason about it, we can imagine it, we can dream of it, we can be it, we can be attracted to it, we can do it, as they say, we can fuck it, eat it and put it in a dumpster.

So, what is it? It’s you. Your body, your mind, your memories, your mental connection of interrelated concepts, your neurochemoelectrobiological processes and structures, your neuron cells, your hydrophobic cell walls, the enormous and unique molecule DNA that has created your body. Did God create billions of galaxies with billions of stars in each to fuse the tiny, teeny, really, really, really petite and wee lil little protons into atoms and blew up the stars like they were just flares that fizzle and die in a second? We’re really small compared to the star balls bursting while our sun is 4500 000 000 years old, as is the solar system, including earth but not the people who have lived here for not a very long time considering the threat of the bursting bubble overhead. But since we’re so small, we don’t have to worry about that happening any time soon. Instead we adapt to an environment which contains a sun, and an atmosphere, and gravity, and trees, and bugs, and water and carbon and nitrogen, which contain the same atoms that make up the DNA molecule. Wasn’t it clever of God to make everything out of the most common things, makes so much more sense. Almost so much sense it was self-evident and would happen even without a god just because of the laws of gravity and chemistry and matter and motion. Surely, it’d be hard to predict that humans would exist and we are unique, but the universe is material and it can be predicted, you just need more computational power than is in the universe to predict it, however, some predictions don’t need 100% accuracy. We can use our knowledge of the material world to explore ourselves, the universe and the smallest and biggest and oldest and fastest and the edges of the universe, although that might take millions of years and I’ll just mention it now and wont make it part of my election campaign for king of the universe in the year 232,100 ANNO DOMINI.

So, how can it be mental? We can study the body and compare objectively with each other and then compare that with our subjective experience. We find that it’s coherent to talk of the body as a material structure, a chemical signature in the universe, brought forth as a shield to protect and nourish the spread of the DNA molecule. That’s the meaning of life. As social and mental beings we don’t have to care about the meaning of life if we don’t want to. It is not coherent to talk about angels and gods and unicorns. Instead we ask if the body holds the answers to our souls and it turns out that the mind is produced by a machine which we can describe in detail down to the size of atoms, we even find the material causes of the mental experiences that proponents of metaphysics invoke as evidence for their immaterial claims. We can find the answers to deja vu, fear, vision, feelings, sex, the belief that the universe must be like humans, caring and willful, the belief that we are a magical constant that travels through time, but time is just a function of motion and we are not constant souls, we are new states of mind produces every new day, every time a single thing moves in the brain (except the sub/unconscious stuff), produced by the machine and always brand new. The reason we think we are continuous is because when our new us’ experience the world, the think about their past as it has been stored in the neurocellular structure and is activated by the input and roundput in the brain and upon remembering the past experiences of the body, we identify with that body, mistaking it for a soul.

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This entry was posted on July 6, 2012 at 5:31 am and is filed under Debates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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